CVS Health Careers Blog
A career resource for current and future employees.

PBM Pharmacistsâ€™ Role in Patient Care at CVS Health

This article was originally posted internally on the CVS Health colleague intranet.

Did you know CVS CaremarkÂ employs nearly 2,000 pharmacists and many more pharmacy technicians in our mail service and specialty pharmacy businesses?

These colleagues have unique opportunities to work in areas different from a traditional pharmacy setting, including operations management, training, prior authorization, coverage determination and appeals, operations technology and professional practice.

Prescription verification and quality control are important elements of my job. I use dual screens to ensure that prescription information from the physician has been entered correctly on the patientâ€™s account. I examine the patientâ€™s medications and look for interactions or duplicate therapies. If we see an interaction or duplicate therapy, we contact the prescriber to alert them of potential issues, and take calls from the office to resolve issues.

I also counsel patients on the importance of medication adherence, and recently become involved in part of our medication therapy management program (MTM). The program identifies patients who have multiple chronic disease states and are on eight or more medications, who could benefit from the expertise of a pharmacistâ€™s comprehensive, targeted medication review. We spend 20-40 minutes on the phone with each patient, discussing how their prescriptions and over-the-counter medications may affect each other, offering ways to manage their conditions, advising on adherence and safety, and even reviewing prescription costs. Iâ€™m able to use the skills I acquired in pharmacy school to talk with patients, listen to them, provide advice, and keep them safe and adherent to their medications.

ViniÂ Mathew,Â TroyÂ SpecialtyÂ Pharmacy,Â MichiganÂ

AsÂ aÂ Specialty pharmacist, my role is to dispense and provide therapy management forÂ patientsÂ whoÂ takeÂ high-costÂ specialty medications,Â requiringÂ special handling or storage, and have a limited or restricted distribution.Â WeÂ provideÂ patient-focused services suchÂ as therapy/disease state counseling, ongoing assessment for responseÂ and adverse effects, also interventions that can improve clinicalÂ outcomes.

As part of the geo-preferencing strategy to dispense from pharmacies closest to patients, other CVS SpecialtyÂ pharmacies and Centers of ExcellencesÂ send their specialty ordersÂ to us. We are able to verify theÂ front-end of an order, and have back-end capabilities to ship out the orders.

Iâ€™ve beenÂ with CVS HealthÂ almost six years, and Iâ€™m mostÂ proud of the optimum care and excellent service our team provides to the CVS Specialty patient and to the prescriberâ€™s office.

The pharmacy Â serviceÂ representatives,Â pharmacyÂ technicians and operations assistants atÂ ourÂ Troy location are dedicated and caring colleagues, and together, we help patients on their path to better health.

We recently updated our Pharmacist hiring section on our career site.Â Our pharmacists continue to build that trust by providing our patients with the best advice and caring guidance to every patient, every day.

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About CVS Health

Millions of times a day, we're helping people on their path to better health-from advising on prescriptions to helping manage chronic and specialty conditions. Because we're present in so many moments, big and small, we have an active, supportive role in shaping the future of health care.